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When she was younger, Wendy Vaux would often lie in bed at night with her eyes closed and wish for a miracle: To wake up thin.

The five-foot-four Quebec grandmother, who once weighed a whopping 372 pounds at her heaviest, remembers that fruitless bedtime ritual well.

“I was always heavy,” recalls Vaux, 48. “I was thinking things would just change in my life and I would become thin.”

Wishful thinking, indeed.

In her late 20s, Vaux did manage to lose more than 100 pounds after joining TOPS Club Inc., a nonprofit weight-loss education and support group also known as Take Off Pounds Sensibly.

But with two young children at home, Vaux stopped attending the weekly weigh-ins/meetings.

“I didn’t feel like I had the time to go to TOPS every week,” explains the resident of Greenfield Park, Que. “I was young and thought I could continue on my own.”

With no accountability, however, Vaux slid into some old eating habits.

The self-admitted yo-yo-dieter and emotional eater eventually regained the 100 or so pounds. And more.

It was a burden that hampered her day-to-day living and almost made her quit her office job the day after she started.

Vaux works on the 17th floor of a downtown Montreal office building where fire drills are routinely conducted.

“My second day of my job we had a fire drill and I was going to quit because I thought, ‘If I have to do this very often, I’m going to die,’” she admits.

Her building was evacuated for an actual emergency on Sept. 13, 2006, when a deadly shooting spree occurred on the nearby Dawson College campus.

“When we got downstairs, they told me to run,” she says. “There was no way I was going to run. If there was anyone with a gun, I wasn’t moving fast enough.”

It turns out that a gunman was the least of her worries. As Vaux would realize less than five years later, she was much more likely to die a premature death due to her poor lifestyle choices.

On April 8, 2011, Vaux was admitted to hospital after suffering what doctors feared was a heart attack.

That diagnosis, however, couldn’t be confirmed because “they couldn’t run any tests as I was too large to fit in the machines,” she recalls, noting it was a Friday. “They told me I’d have to wait until the following Monday to see if another local hospital had an angiogram table that could hold my weight.”

Vaux was a morbidly obese 372 pounds. She underwent a battery of tests during what would be a five-night stay in hospital. And although it was unknown whether she had had a heart attack, doctors did detect some damage to a coronary artery.

“It was enough to wake me up and realize it was time to make a change in my life,” she says, noting one physician told her she wouldn’t make it to 50 if she continued on the same path.

“I was very scared. I had scared my husband and kids. And I wanted to be around for my grandson. … I knew what I had to do.”

Vaux made immediate changes to her diet and lost almost 13 pounds before re-joining TOPS on May 2, 2011 at 359.5 pounds.

Later that summer, she also started an exercise program for beginners.

By Sept. 24, 2012, which happened to be her 24th wedding anniversary, Vaux weighed 150 pounds.

During the stunning 16-month metamorphosis, she dropped 222 pounds and went from Size 6XL clothes to Size 10.

“I changed my eating habits and stuck to it,” she explains. “I could eat all the same foods, I just had to watch my portion control and mark down what I was eating. There’s no big secret. Everybody tells you what you have to do, but until you do it or until you get to the right mindset to do it, you think there’s an easy way.”

Vaux, who was crowned TOPS’s International Queen for 2012, is grateful to her supportive family, including husband Jim, and her “TOPS family” for helping her to reclaim her life.

“Now I go to the park with my (two-year-old) grandson, I climb the monkey bars with him and go down the slide with him — simple things that you don’t realize you’re missing out on when you’re carrying all that extra weight around,” she says.

And fire drills have never felt better.

“Now when we have a fire drill, I’m the first down the stairs,” she chuckles, “and I’m outside thinking, ‘That was fun — let’s do it again!’”

While continuing to carefully watch her food portions, Vaux now hits the gym four times a week, doing cardio on three of those days and lifting weights on the other. She also regularly takes Zumba and body toning classes, and goes for hour-long walks most days.

As for “waking up thin,” well, that miracle obviously never happened, laughs Vaux, noting there’s no overnight solution in the battle of the bulge.

“I actually had to work for it,” she adds. “It’s not easy, but if you make the effort, you reap the benefits. It’s fantastic!”